Hard data confirms what many of us have been warning: the American right is actively embracing authoritarianism

[torbee]

American "conservatives" are now much more aligned in their thinking with the populace and politicians of places like Turkey, Russia and Hungary than our former peers in Western Europe, Canada, Australia and other liberal democracies.

​

View in browser New Data: Republican Voters Want Authoritarianism​ Inside the World Values Survey.​ Jonathan V. Last Mar 10 ​ ​ ​ 1. Values Voters​ Why did a plurality of voters choose Trump? The question is a Rorschach. The most complete answer is that voters chose him for all the reasons. Seventy-seven million people voted for the guy. No matter what basket of reasons you want to come up with, there is a bucket of voters who chose Trump based on them.¹ So I want to preface today’s conversation by emphasizing that the answer isn’t either/or. It’s and/both. That said: One of my theories about the last eight years is that a growing number of Americans have become not just tolerant of, but affirmatively for, authoritarianism. The corollary being: In 2024, some significant portion of voters chose Trump not in spite of his explicitly authoritarian program but because of it. Today we have some hard data to support this theory. Republican voters have—objectively—become more fascist and authoritarian in their values and political preferences. Last week the Financial Times published an extraordinary piece by John Burn-Murdoch.² He looked at data from the most recent World Values Survey and found that Republican voters in America have changed their outlook in recent years. They no longer want their country to be liberal. They want it to be illiberal. Here’s Burn-Murdoch: Usually, analysis is done at national level, but by drilling down to different political parties in the latest raw data, I find that on everything from attitudes towards international co-operation, to appetite for an autocratic leadership style, through to trust in institutions and inward- vs outward-looking mindset, Trump’s America is a stark outlier from western Europe and the rest of the Anglosphere. In many cases, the Maga mindset is much closer to that of Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey. You have to see the data to believe it: ​ I want you think about this—and I mean really think about it: Republicans aren’t just closer in worldview to Turkey and Russia than they are to Democrats. The right-wing European parties are closer to Democrats than they are to Republicans. Let me give you some context. The World Values Survey is a battery of questions designed to get at people’s social outlook. Do they trust institutions? Do they tolerate corruption? How central is politics to their identity? You can look at the Wave 8 questionnaire here. Some sample questions: ​ ​ Please sit with this again: In responses to questions like these, Republican answers lined up neatly with the answers from Turks and Russians and were close to answers from people in China. I do not know any way to assimilate this data except to propose that many Republicans chose Trump because they heard his authoritarian pitch, believed it, and voted for him to implement it. As for how many Republican voters operated this way, based on this data the most likely answer is: More than you previously thought.​

 

[torbee]

2. Nothing New​

Last week Alan Elrod wrote one of the most important pieces we’ve ever published at The Bulwark. His thesis is that the current authoritarian preferences of the Republican party are not new to American politics. They are merely new to national politics.

Because authoritarianism has been the bread and butter of the American South since the Founding.

I am begging you to read Elrod’s piece, because it helped me with one of my blind spots. For instance, I had no idea that this was a thing that happened:

In 1898, America’s first coup d’etat took place as the Democrats of Wilmington, North Carolina issued a “White Declaration of Independence.” They were attacking the coalition of black Republicans and white Populists that had control of the local government in the 1890s, which the old Confederates of the city found intolerable. With their resentment and rage being fueled by white Democratic powerbrokers, two thousand armed men forced out the duly elected government. None were more pleased by this result than their Bourbon backers.

“Liberal democracy [never] put down deep roots in the South in the way it did across the rest of the country,” Elrod writes.

The region never really abandoned its warped electoral politics and inclination to single-party cronyism, a Southern political instinct that helps explain how Democratic dominance transformed so completely into Republican one-party rule following the civil rights era.

For 40 years the Republican party played with fire by harnessing these Southern resentments. The theory was that institutional Republicans could use Southern votes to promote economic growth, tax cuts, and hawkish foreign policy without either (a) letting the Southerners take over the party or (b) having their own small-l liberal values corrupted.³

That’s why Republicans nominated a string of basically responsible, normal presidential candidates for 50 years—until 2016.⁴

---

What happened? Lots.

Americans became more geographically mobile. Technology evolved. The media went through an internet revolution. The primary process became more democratic. Political parties lost institutional power. The Cold War ended. Immigration rates increased. People started bowling alone.

Again: This is not an either/or question—it’s and/both. But we must understand that the values of Republican voters as a class did change. Burn-Murdoch visualizes that change by plotting the progress of Republicans over time in the World Values Survey data.

​

I can offer various theories:

• Maybe that big drop beginning after 1999 was a result of 9/11 and attitudes about the war on terror.
• Maybe it was ennui from the Iraq and Afghan wars.
• Maybe it was the election of a black president, which coincides with the post-drop flatline.

But I’ll tell you what it’s not: This affinity for authoritarian values was not caused by economic hardship. The period from 1999 to 2020 is one of the most prosperous stretches in American history and the one big economic downturn—the great recession of 2008-2009—doesn’t register in the data.

---

So let me offer another theory:

Remember “All politics is local”? That maxim has not been correct for a generation. At some point, about 30 years ago, all politics became national.

And when that shift happened, the mores of the Southern Bourbons—of the illiberal South—spread like a virus. The Good Republicans of the Northeast and the West became infected by it. They adopted the grievances and attitudes of the South. They became primed for authoritarianism.

When a genuine authoritarian appeared and took control of the national party, these voters were at first repelled. They hung on out of simple partisan loyalty. But they quickly found that they liked it. They discovered that he was the one they’d been waiting for.

Share

---

Every once in a while lions in a zoo eat a person. Sometimes it’s an accident. Usually it’s because someone is drunk or mentally disturbed and either falls into or sneaks into the lion enclosure. But this is a thing that happens.

After such unfortunate events, apparently the lions often become restless because they do not like returning to the zoo’s diet of cold, pre-killed meat. Once they have a taste for live flesh, the theory goes, they want more of it.

Republican voters have been like this with authoritarianism. They have, over the course of years, slowly changed their values to prefer illiberalism. The rest of us failed to notice, because the institutional Republican party was strong enough to prevent illiberal candidates from making it onto the menu.

But once an illiberal candidate did appear on the national stage, Republican voters realized that they had a hunger for what he offered.

Trump’s dismantling of the federal government, the rule of law, and the Constitution isn’t a shocking development. It’s what a great many of them voted for.

New Data: Republican Voters Want Authoritarianism

Inside the World Values Survey.

www.thebulwark.com

And it is unclear what might cause these people to change their minds and revert to the kind of liberal values they held 30 years ago.

 

[THE_DEVIL]

This should be a humorous thread

 

[BelemNole]

WHY DO YOU COMMIES HATE AUTORITARIANS!?>!??!

 

[Colonoscopy]

I think there are a portion of them that were always that way. Moreso the fundamentalist religious sort. And then there were a bunch of really malleable follow the leader sorts, which I think Trump has effectively captured.

 

[Hawki97]

Republicans playing the gimp and wanting to be dominated by their government is such an odd twist.

 

[Whiskeydeltadeltatango]

Torbee is realizing the World Orgs are super lefties and Europe has gone full on lefties.


Mondays.



There is a reason we have to be the police and paycheck for all these assholes.

 

[Whiskeydeltadeltatango]

Republicans playing the gimp and wanting to be dominated by their government is such an odd twist.

Yes, because what we are seeing daily from the dems fighting for all these NGOs, entirely funded by the government, is the Republicans wanting more government.



You guys are going to have to pick a lane.

 

[Jerome Silberman]

And it is unclear what might cause these people to change their minds and revert to the kind of liberal values they held 30 years ago.

There aren't a lot of authoritarian political movements that don't end in blood once they gain power. We've already seen a taste.

 

[Hawki97]

Yes, because what we are seeing daily from the dems fighting for all these NGOs, entirely funded by the government, is the Republicans wanting more government.



You guys are going to have to pick a lane.

My lane is chosen. I want cuts, I just think blindly swinging a sledgehammer (or a chainsaw) is not the way to do it. All argued in another thread so I won’t discuss it here.

You boyz lapping up a president acting like a king and an autistic court jester trampling all over your laws, privacy, etc. is just weird. Bring out the gimp!

 

[seminole97]

So the Democrats would absolutely oppose having the Federal government setup a 'Disinformation Governance Board' with the intent of coordinating censorship on Americans, right?

Because it's not authoritarianism run amok if you funnel taxpayer funds into NGOs and have those NGOs engage in the dirty work of organizing advertiser boycotts and trying to silence political opposition.

 

[Hawki97]

So the Democrats would absolutely oppose having the Federal government setup a 'Disinformation Governance Board' with the intent of coordinating censorship on Americans, right?

Because it's not authoritarianism run amok if you funnel taxpayer funds into NGOs and have those NGOs engage in the dirty work of organizing advertiser boycotts and trying to silence political opposition.

Was NGO the word of the day on MAGA Playhouse?

 

[Scott559]

Was NGO the word of the day on MAGA Playhouse?

I noticed it as well.

 

[Hawki97]

I noticed it as well.

The HORT boyz are all over it. Tweeters must be back up.

 

[Whiskeydeltadeltatango]

My lane is chosen. I want cuts, I just think blindly swinging a sledgehammer (or a chainsaw) is not the way to do it. All argued in another thread so I won’t discuss it here.

You boyz lapping up a president acting like a king and an autistic court jester trampling all over your laws, privacy, etc. is just weird. Bring out the gimp!

I read something today that said the LA hi speed rail project was on pace, and that pace would take over 150 years to complete.


I'm fully willing to admit there has been more "ready, shoot, aim" than I would prefer but anyone who is being honest knows if the government operated on government timeliness to complete these task it would never get completed. So yeah, this surgery is going to be ugly.



Also, the gimp thing, kinda weird bro, I don't kink shame but I would encourage you to remember that when I started a thread regarding the negative aspects of toxic feminism, many of the same people who "liked" your post, were incapable of discussion.

You can convince me "hitman" is an asshole, but that's not a "gimp" personality type. Northern, the guy who you all say beats his wife.... not likely a gimp. I'll let you decide on youe current relationship with God before using that word with someone like me. I think you see what I'm going for. Now, run some of the other usual suspects through that litmus test.

 

[Scott559]

The HORT boyz are all over it. Tweeters must be back up.

Gotta give credit where it’s due, When the message comes down the parrots are very well trained.

 

[Huey Grey]

Makes sense. Republicans kept referring to Trump as "their boss." Like WTF? He's not your boss. You are his.

 

[Tom Paris]

American "conservatives" are now much more aligned in their thinking with the populace and politicians of places like Turkey, Russia and Hungary than our former peers in Western Europe, Canada, Australia and other liberal democracies.

​

​ ​ View in browser New Data: Republican Voters Want Authoritarianism​ ​ Inside the World Values Survey.​ Jonathan V. Last Mar 10 ​ ​ ​ ​ 1. Values Voters​ Why did a plurality of voters choose Trump? The question is a Rorschach. The most complete answer is that voters chose him for all the reasons. Seventy-seven million people voted for the guy. No matter what basket of reasons you want to come up with, there is a bucket of voters who chose Trump based on them.¹ So I want to preface today’s conversation by emphasizing that the answer isn’t either/or. It’s and/both. That said: One of my theories about the last eight years is that a growing number of Americans have become not just tolerant of, but affirmatively for, authoritarianism. The corollary being: In 2024, some significant portion of voters chose Trump not in spite of his explicitly authoritarian program but because of it. Today we have some hard data to support this theory. Republican voters have—objectively—become more fascist and authoritarian in their values and political preferences. Last week the Financial Times published an extraordinary piece by John Burn-Murdoch.² He looked at data from the most recent World Values Survey and found that Republican voters in America have changed their outlook in recent years. They no longer want their country to be liberal. They want it to be illiberal. Here’s Burn-Murdoch: You have to see the data to believe it: ​ ​ I want you think about this—and I mean really think about it: Republicans aren’t just closer in worldview to Turkey and Russia than they are to Democrats. The right-wing European parties are closer to Democrats than they are to Republicans. Let me give you some context. The World Values Survey is a battery of questions designed to get at people’s social outlook. Do they trust institutions? Do they tolerate corruption? How central is politics to their identity? You can look at the Wave 8 questionnaire here. Some sample questions:​ ​ ​ Please sit with this again: In responses to questions like these, Republican answers lined up neatly with the answers from Turks and Russians and were close to answers from people in China. I do not know any way to assimilate this data except to propose that many Republicans chose Trump because they heard his authoritarian pitch, believed it, and voted for him to implement it. As for how manyRepublican voters operated this way, based on this data the most likely answer is: More than you previously thought.

@binsfeldcyhawk2

Told ya.

 

[BelemNole]

You think it's coincidence that they keep making images of him as king?

 

[NorthernHawkeye]

I'll say it one more time so everyone understands, maybe I didn't articulate it correctly the first time: I will not - for some time - be posting new political threads.

I likely will still comment on some of the threads here and there however, as I am not abandoning caring about politics or my country.

 

[seminole97]

Was NGO the word of the day on MAGA Playhouse?

Skip ahead to page 8 if you want to read about how the Censorship Industrial Complex the last administration was constructing was built and worked:

https://docs.house.gov/meetings

 

[torbee]

Can someone explain the concept of time passing to Northern please? 😂 😂 😂 😂

 

[Scott559]

Can someone explain the concept of time passing to Northern please? 😂 😂 😂 😂

I can try, Before the election Northern felt very bad for families struggling to put food on the table, Time has now passed, we have a new President and things aren’t getting better for families struggling to put food on the table. Not a peep from Northern.

 

[Chishawk1425]

2. Nothing New​

Last week Alan Elrod wrote one of the most important pieces we’ve ever published at The Bulwark. His thesis is that the current authoritarian preferences of the Republican party are not new to American politics. They are merely new to national politics.

Because authoritarianism has been the bread and butter of the American South since the Founding.

I am begging you to read Elrod’s piece, because it helped me with one of my blind spots. For instance, I had no idea that this was a thing that happened:


“Liberal democracy [never] put down deep roots in the South in the way it did across the rest of the country,” Elrod writes.


For 40 years the Republican party played with fire by harnessing these Southern resentments. The theory was that institutional Republicans could use Southern votes to promote economic growth, tax cuts, and hawkish foreign policy without either (a) letting the Southerners take over the party or (b) having their own small-l liberal values corrupted.³

That’s why Republicans nominated a string of basically responsible, normal presidential candidates for 50 years—until 2016.⁴

---

What happened? Lots.

Americans became more geographically mobile. Technology evolved. The media went through an internet revolution. The primary process became more democratic. Political parties lost institutional power. The Cold War ended. Immigration rates increased. People started bowling alone.

Again: This is not an either/or question—it’s and/both. But we must understand that the values of Republican voters as a class did change. Burn-Murdoch visualizes that change by plotting the progress of Republicans over time in the World Values Survey data.

​

I can offer various theories:

• Maybe that big drop beginning after 1999 was a result of 9/11 and attitudes about the war on terror.
• Maybe it was ennui from the Iraq and Afghan wars.
• Maybe it was the election of a black president, which coincides with the post-drop flatline.

But I’ll tell you what it’s not: This affinity for authoritarian values was not caused by economic hardship. The period from 1999 to 2020 is one of the most prosperous stretches in American history and the one big economic downturn—the great recession of 2008-2009—doesn’t register in the data.

---

So let me offer another theory:

Remember “All politics is local”? That maxim has not been correct for a generation. At some point, about 30 years ago, all politics became national.

And when that shift happened, the mores of the Southern Bourbons—of the illiberal South—spread like a virus. The Good Republicans of the Northeast and the West became infected by it. They adopted the grievances and attitudes of the South. They became primed for authoritarianism.

When a genuine authoritarian appeared and took control of the national party, these voters were at first repelled. They hung on out of simple partisan loyalty. But they quickly found that they liked it. They discovered that he was the one they’d been waiting for.

Share

---

Every once in a while lions in a zoo eat a person. Sometimes it’s an accident. Usually it’s because someone is drunk or mentally disturbed and either falls into or sneaks into the lion enclosure. But this is a thing that happens.

After such unfortunate events, apparently the lions often become restless because they do not like returning to the zoo’s diet of cold, pre-killed meat. Once they have a taste for live flesh, the theory goes, they want more of it.

Republican voters have been like this with authoritarianism. They have, over the course of years, slowly changed their values to prefer illiberalism. The rest of us failed to notice, because the institutional Republican party was strong enough to prevent illiberal candidates from making it onto the menu.

But once an illiberal candidate did appear on the national stage, Republican voters realized that they had a hunger for what he offered.

Trump’s dismantling of the federal government, the rule of law, and the Constitution isn’t a shocking development. It’s what a great many of them voted for.

New Data: Republican Voters Want Authoritarianism

Inside the World Values Survey.

www.thebulwark.com

And it is unclear what might cause these people to change their minds and revert to the kind of liberal values they held 30 years ago.

So MAGA is Taliban
Taliban is MAGA??

 

[Chishawk1425]

@binsfeldcyhawk2

Told ya.

Cosigned

 

[cohawk]

I can try, Before the election Northern felt very bad for families struggling to put food on the table, Time has now passed, we have a new President and things aren’t getting better for families struggling to put food on the table. Not a peep from Northern.

You didn't hear from him as it's an anger-based movement. They aren't really for anything. It's what happens when you like to follow vs think.

 

[luvmyhawks]

I can try, Before the election Northern felt very bad for families struggling to put food on the table, Time has now passed, we have a new President and things aren’t getting better for families struggling to put food on the table. Not a peep from Northern.

Shit, not only is it not getting better, it is getting worse.

 

[torbee]

So MAGA is Taliban
Taliban is MAGA??

View embedded media

More like MAGA is Erdogan
Erdogan is MAGA

But same general concept.

 

[Chishawk1425]

More like MAGA is Erdogan
Erdogan is MAGA

But same general concept.

Absolutely but I was close with my Taliban prediction years ago when scoffed at we are sticking with it.

 

[binsfeldcyhawk2]

@binsfeldcyhawk2

Told ya.

Told me what?

You said Trump was Hitler, that we live in 1930’s Germany and democracy has ended.

I still don’t think that’s true, because it isn’t.

 

[bdcolt45er]

Told me what?

You said Trump was Hitler, that we live in 1930’s Germany and democracy has ended.

I still don’t think that’s true, because it isn’t.

Not Hitler is the absolute lowest of bars.

 

[artradley]

The right has always been authoritative. They has always loved strongmen. I've been saying that since the 80's.

 

[binsfeldcyhawk2]

Not Hitler is the absolute lowest of bars.

Then don’t use him as the bar. Pretty simple.

 

[Huey Grey]

So MAGA is Taliban
Taliban is MAGA??

View embedded media

This was only a few years ago. Trump's face is dropping almost as fast as his market.

 

[bdcolt45er]

Then don’t use him as the bar. Pretty simple.

I didn't make that comparison, but VP Vance did.

 

[Joes Place]

Then don’t use him as the bar. Pretty simple.

If Republicans and Trumpers don't want to be compared to Nazis, then quit doing the the things that Nazis and authoritarians do:

Eric Topol (@erictopol.bsky.social)

No one is tracking this as closely as my friend Christina, and she's in the UK! [contains quote post or other embedded content]

bsky.app

Censor, purge, defund: how Trump is following the authoritarian playbook on science and universities

I have mapped 35 of the Trump administration's attacks on science and universities to the authoritarian playbook - and consider what it means for attacks still to come

christinapagel.substack.com

 

[binsfeldcyhawk2]

I didn't make that comparison, but VP Vance did.

 

[CarolinaHawkeye]

Can someone explain anything to Northern please? 😂 😂 😂 😂

FIFY

 

[CarolinaHawkeye]

Told me what?

You said Trump was Hitler, that we live in 1930’s Germany and democracy has ended.

I still don’t think that’s true, because it isn’t.

Well we don't live in Germany.

 

[TarponSpringsNole]

Was NGO the word of the day on MAGA Playhouse?

Yes. They’re all using it because it’s only three letters and makes them feel smart. lol. Silly, dumbass maga.